Redemption Song

by Chris Salewicz

  At this point, early in the summer of 1972, several of the former Ridley Road collective also said ‘Ah, fuck it’ to London. The father of a friend owned a farm outside Blandford Forum in Dorset, 140 miles to the west of London and for the last nine or so months Woody and his friends from Ridley Road, with the addition of Deborah Kartun, would frequently hitchhike down there for a few days’ respite from London. But now, because of their lack of permanent accommodation in London, a planned ’weekend in Dorset’ turned into a stay of two months. As, according to Dick the Shit, ‘there was all sorts of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll’ going on, a blind eye needed to be turned by the farm owner, who happened to be the local Justice of the Peace. The fact that an Indian tepee, in which Woody frequently slept, had been set up by the visitors on his grounds was no doubt considered only an aesthetic embellishment. Deborah Kartun joined him there for the duration: ‘the Tepee, which we shared, was really tiny. It wasn’t a “Tepee People” thing, it was one from a child’s toyshop.’

  When Deborah went away for a couple of weeks on a family holiday, Woody wrote to her in a letter that fully expresses his tender feelings for her:

  Dear Debbie,

  My arms and legs are aching and there is straw in my hair. I have been working all day on this farm – it’s really good work because its [sic] “in time with the seasons” if you know what I mean.

  I just got your letter … it was lovely. I really enjoyed reading it, and it put me in a good mood. I hope you don’t look like that drawing! Oh yeah last night we were all standing around after work getting paid when who should drive up but Ken Turner! Later on when we passed around the joints he got pissed off a bit and left. I can imagine the house and fields and woods from when we went there last time. I can see you wandering about like this.

  I really would like to be with you – two weeks isn’t long at all, but I’m a bit better off than you because I’ve got something to do re work but you’re on holiday.

  Love

  Love

  Love

  Woody XXX

  I LOVE YOU

  Woody’s loving cartoon of Deborah Kartun. (Deborah van ber Beek, née Kartun)

  But from the bottom of his heart Joe also cared for and loved his male friends. ‘Drug cocktails’ were such a specialty of the house that Dick the Shit began to develop what Woody Mellor considered to be a dependency on amphetamines. ‘He solved that problem for me by sitting me down in a room and repeatedly playing Canned Heat’s “Speed Kills”. He was being a real friend, and sorted that out for me.’

  The assembled collective made ends meet by haphazardly labouring on the farm. ‘We made a life-size replica of Stonehenge out of straw bales. We all got severe bollockings for that.’

  But the last straw was when Helen Cherry went down to answer the door to the postman with no clothes on. ‘He runs back to the village and announces, “There’s sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll up there.” We all got kicked out. Joe went back to town.’

  For her part Deborah Kartun went off to Cardiff Art School, to begin a three-year degree course in ceramics. ‘That was when I dumped Woody. I had to split up with him: he was dropping out quite seriously, and doing a lot of speed and acid. He was becoming quite wild, and was difficult to live with – you’d make an arrangement and he’d turn up four days late.

  ‘But I don’t know if he realised I adored him. But we were both acting parts very much, part of that art-school thing. You know how he always acted. I remember he went to an early Gilbert and George show, and was bowled over by it. We went to a fancy-dress party where I dressed up as a vampire tough woman, gorgeous fifties’ dress, but with plastic vampire teeth. He got very upset.

  ‘But the acting thread ran through everything all of us did: it was play-acting, like children, all a continuation of dressing up as kids. Even his cowboys and Indians thing was part of this conceptual approach to life.’

  But Woody Mellor had friends at the art school in Newport, a few miles from where Deborah was studying in Cardiff.

  In November 1972 he wrote to Annie Day from Upper Warlingham at what in hindsight we may see as a pivotal point in his life; although he writes on a greetings card, which bears the image of a blue elephant – shooting flowers out of its trunk – under the light of a full moon in a floral jungle, he packs both sides with his neat italic script; the envelope is postmarked ‘Croydon Surrey, 10.45am 15 Nov 1972’, and he has appended the phrase ‘Tutti Fruti Mail Service’ by the stamp.

  Dear Anne I’m doin’ a cartoon strip at the moment called ‘GONAD SLEEPS IN LATRINES’. I have to because in a flash moment I said I’d do it for the college I used to go to’s magazine. This girl was supposed to do it but she couldn’t be arsed and I saw a chance to get my famous character in print but now in the early hours of the morning I begin to weary and the cigarette smoke drifts into my eyes but with a few tons of SELF CONTROL I should finish in about 3 hours. I’m down at my parents home for the weekend and tomorrow I’m going back to London, then on Wednesday I’m going down the M4 to Newport in Wales. I’ve decided to settle down there HA-HA for a while at least. The stinking press of humanity drives me from London. I wonder how yer college education is getting on. What are you learning anyway? Will you accept belated thanks for that last letter of yours? Cut your hair? I’ve just had mine done. I wanted it Futuristic so at the moment its like the Queen’s. Last week I had a great rocknroll quiff but it takes a lot of sweat to keep it like that. Maybe I gotta use Brylcreem again. I’m playing the guitar a lot now and I’m goin down Newport to practice and get shit hot. May take a year or too [sic]. Well now, you got any young men chasing you? It might make life more interesting but NEVER believe a word they say. What do you think of the picture on the front? I got it because it looks just like a bad copy of ROUSSEAU which I suppose it is. Some of that guy’s paintings are really OK. Do you know that one with a tiger asleep in a desert with a full moon? Its my favourite, makes you want to cry if you’re drunk. And I think he was a bank clerk during the day and doing these really weird pictures at night. I got a real NIGHT scene set up here at the moment with Radio Lux just turned up dead faint so you can hardly hear the guy say “DATELINE – friendship, love and EVEN marriage”! I’m sittin at my drum kit with a drawing board on the snare drum and a spotlight on the side Tom Tom because it’s the only “table” available but I have to be careful not to tap the bass drum pedals when some rock n roll comes on because it will wake the P. and M. In one of your letters you say you were listening to the Doors, well funny you should say that because I’ve been living with a guy whose nuts on the Doors and he puts on ‘Riders of the Storm’ and I’ve been thinking it’s real good because before I didn’t reckon on them. ‘LA Woman’ that’s good too. It’s a pity Jim Morrison died he was OK. Have you heard ‘Runnin Blue’? That’s neat. Ah Kid Jensen [the Radio Luxembourg disc jockey] puts on the crummy records! I’m staying with a friend when I get to Newport but when I get a place I’ll send you the address straight off OK? I was goin to draw you a souvenir picture of Gonad but I can’t now. All my lovin John. PS. You heard Buddy Holly? Keep well XXX’

  Of course, the most interesting information in this revealing missive is John Mellor’s announcement of his ability with the guitar: ‘I’m playing the guitar a lot now, and I’m goin … get shit hot. May take a year or too.’ Clearly he had decided to follow a musical course with complete dedication.

  ‘I ended up in Wales, after I had served my apprenticeship with Tymon Dogg, and there didn’t seem to be any way of making a living in London or surviving … and I followed a girl to Cardiff Art School, who I’d known in London, and she told me that she wasn’t interested, and I started to hitch back to London, and the first town you come to is Newport in South Wales … And then I got a job in the graveyard, got a room, crashed my way into art school, although I wasn’t at the art school, into the art school rock band, and that was really great, to learn your chops with some really kind people who let me sleep on the f
loor at first, and yeah that gave me a whole heap of help.’

  The ‘really kind people’ were Jill Calvert, Gail Goodall’s cousin, and her boyfriend Mickey Foote. Mickey Foote had got into Newport art school ‘by accident’, said Jill. ‘He drove someone else down for an interview and got in. He was very talented.’ There was also a practical reality about this move, as Joe later told his friend Keith Allen: ‘I went there because there wasn’t any room in London. That’s why I went there. I was sleeping on someone’s floor, for a few months, in their kitchen, in a two-room flat, and you outstay your welcome. And I had a girlfriend at Cardiff Art College. So I thought I’d hitch down there and rekindle the romance. And I hitched down to Cardiff and she told me to shove off. And so I started to hitch back and the first stop off was Newport, and I had some friends there at Newport, ‘cause these were all people I’d met at the foundation year in London at Central. And I hadn’t made it into any other course so I was kind of on the lam.’

  ‘Suddenly,’ said Jill Calvert, ‘Joe turned up in the corridor of Newport College of Art, a massive public building, with his guitar on his back, and that was that. He was standing there, and I was very surprised. He wasn’t into Divine Light any more. Helen Cherry says he walked around at Central with a white sheet on. But when he came down to Newport he wasn’t into religion. He left all that behind him. He came with that guitar on his back and Divine Light wasn’t going to do it for him.’

  Woody Mellor at first stayed with a friend from Central School of Art called Forbes Leishman, now a student at Newport, who’d taken him to the Students’ Union building on Stow Hill. At first Woody moved in with him; we get a glimpse of his life in Newport from a letter that he sent to Paul Buck:

  So I’m living in Newport Mon[mouthshire]. I’m sending you a letter and want to buy you a guitar. £10 – yeah. You are getting a bass before you get a car. I don’t have my room here, but my address is Wood c/o Sir Forbes Freshman, 18 North Street, Newport, Wales. Forbes is the guy I’m staying with in Newport and I want to do this all winter: chasing women and playing guitar. Maybe that fearsome rock and roll band the Juggernauts might rise from the ashes of the 20th century. I went to see Deb, oh I need her, she don’t need me. Oh my darling can’t you see. I’m going to be a kitchen porter during this hard hard winter. I’ve got access to a piano but I know next to nothing about it. Well it could be better, it could be worse, we could be all be riding in a hearse. We could be ailing and screaming, we could be dying and bleeding, have you never seen a witch mutter her curse. The only thing for us to do is to sit down and play away hazy man til our dying days. Love Wood.

  Newport, a mining district, had a strong local branch of the Communist Party. ‘They wanted to recruit Joe and me and Mickey into the Communist Party,’ remembered Jill Calvert. ‘Their main recruitment method was through dope. Joe and I went along to one of their meetings, and they cooked us a meal except that it was meat, and he was vegetarian, and I don’t think I ate anything either. So he smoked a lot of their dope that evening, but we didn’t join the Communist Party.’ Somewhat enamoured of a girl who was a party member, Woody did occasionally participate in some of its more grassroots activities. ‘Toeing any line is obviously a dodgy situation, or I’d have joined the Communist Party years ago,’ Joe Strummer said later. ‘I’ve done my time selling the Morning Star at pitheads in Wales, and it’s just not happening.’

  The Communist Party was not the only form of marginal entertainment in Newport. The town was ten miles from Cardiff’s Tiger Bay district, a notorious anything-goes area that had been taken over by Africans and Afro-Caribbeans. In Newport docks there was a club called The Silver Sands, a Jamaican shebeen, run by a Mr and Mrs White, who were black. After paying the 10p door entrance to the wheelchair-bound Mr White, it was obligatory to buy a can of Colt 45 from Mrs White before proceeding two floors down; here a sound system had been set up with speakers as big as packing-cases from which reggae boomed and batted out, some of the Jamaican customers taking it in turns to ‘toast’ on a mike to this somewhat alien music. Woody would come along to it most Friday or Saturday nights, and it seems this was where he was first fully exposed to Jamaican music. Later he talked about how reggae’s rhythms had at first not made sense to him, until he spent an entire Christmas in Newport on acid listening to Big Youth.

  In early 1973 Forbes helped Woody find somewhere to live: a friend at Newport Art School called Alun Jones, also known as Jiving Al, needed someone to share his flat. 12 Pentonville was supported by metal rods that held up the house: ‘the flat had an absolutely filthy kitchen,’ said Richard Frame, another Newport student who took over Woody’s room from him. Frame remembered scouring specialist record shops in Cardiff with Woody. ‘He was looking for Woody Guthrie records,’ he said, as though John Mellor was now trying to source the origins of his nickname.

  Jiving Al Jones was a significant addition to the life of Woody Mellor. He was bass-player with a rock’n’roll group called the Rip Off Park All Stars, who covered original rock’n’roll songs with considerable dedication to showmanship. In Newport there was a big scene of teddy-boys and teddy-girls sporting the necessary accoutrements of brothel-creeper shoes and bouffant hair. By the time Woody Mellor had arrived in Newport, the Rip Off Park All Stars had run their allotted time and the group was hardly playing. Jiving Al and Rob Haymer, the group’s guitarist, decided to form another group, working with similar material. A drummer was found, a local mortuary attendant called Jeff Cooper. And who else might Jiving Al think of as front-man for this new, as yet unnamed group but his flatmate? ‘He’d just bought a guitar and taught himself to play in three to six months. He was a really determined man,’ said Jiving Al. But Woody was still a neophyte on guitar, and his voice was distinctly untutored. Yet he had a way into the group: ‘They had a drummer in the art school group but they didn’t have a drum kit, so I blagged my way into the group by saying, “You can have my drum kit, or use it, if I’m the singer.” So I blagged my way into the group like that.’

  He was in Newport for almost a year before the musicians really began to gel as a group. In a letter to Paul Buck, he talked – among other things – about their rehearsals:

  I’m working in a cemetery filling in graves getting £15.50 a week. We’ve got a new band together which might be OK if I don’t get thrown out for my voice. It’s so futuristic. They won’t let me play guitar because I can’t move my fingers fast enough. But screw that, so I’m practising at home and just singing with them whenever we get together for a practice. But you’ve got a bass. Every minute counts between now and next year. I’ll be at the same address next month. Are you going abroad? I’m trying to save money but I’m just getting out of debt. If the band gets going OK we’ve got a gig in February, I think I’ll hang around and pay my dues. You remember Chris? Blond Chris Payne. Last night he came up with his guitar for a go. I got my drums up here too. Next Friday I am going to take Deb to the flicks. I fancy going somewhere in Spring or Summer … We’re 20 years old, halfway through. Love Wood. When I’m out of debt in maybe seven weeks I’ll come to see you, okay. Johnny is a drum. Name and address of sender – American Sam.

  The next letter to Paul Buck is dated 24 October 1973.

  Dear Pablo, great stuff about bass and it looks good too. What make is it? A Fender? I thought you had half a million saved up, to put the down payment on a transcontinental sleeper bus or something. About 3 weeks ago I had a £30 quid tax rebate and this typewriter cost £10 and as for the other fucking £20 who knows. I’ll give you a quick rundown on what’s been going on down here. This is how it is. This band is called Deus Ex Machina, and there’s four of us. The lead guitarist is called Rob and he’s an egomaniac like myself and he’s OK. Then there’s Al on the bass and he’s a bit neurotic, you know, a bit dodgy baby, and Rob, I suppose he’s the guy who makes the decisions, and he told me that he had a secret plan to get rid of him on account of his neurosis, although he’s a nice bloke maybe he’s not strong e
nough to stand the pace. Then there’s Geoff the drummer who’s much older than us with a bit of experience but again he gets a bit down about chicks etc. But he’s bloody good but maybe he’ll go too in time. So there you have it. Oh yeah, and there’s me doing the sort of Mick Jagger bit and a bit of acoustic. We did four gigs last week. The first one was playing at the student union disco which we played good although I was shitting because it was my first gig but I learnt much there. And the next day we went to play in a party in a hotel in Shrewsbury, one of the bass-player’s friends’ 21st. That was a rub out because the hotel manager turned the main fuse off – ha ha. Then on the way back the van ran out of petrol and me and Rob walked 7 miles back into Newport at 3 o’clock in the morning. The typewriter nearly broke down back there. After that it gets better and better. We played the famed Kensington Club which is a big club where people like Dr John play on tours and on Monday nights where they have a crud night where they only charge 15p and bands trying to make it play. We were the only band on and there was 776 people there. The manager said after it was great. There was all these teenage typists and smooth trendy guys and we came on looking dead rough and went straight into Tobacco Road and Can’t Explain etc. I was sweating like a pig and I had black nail varnish on with me leathers. Rob was wearing an old dressing gown with an Elvis t-shirt underneath with braces. Then we played at the Arts College Dance supporting Good Habit who charged £100 which is a fuck of a lot. I was completely drunk and wearing clowns trousers and we played really good. We even whipped out Johnny Be Good which we’d never played before. So that’s how it is. We’re just practicing at the moment. Thank you for your letter. There ain’t much to do except be a rock and roller and maybe get a little drunk and type all through the night. I’m still working sort of but I don’t go in much now. Well they won’t sack me. Good pictures. Here’s one of me in a graveyard. [He encloses a photograph of himself, with shoulder-length hair.] I’d been up the pub with the diggers and they drank 3 pints with an empty belly in 25 minutes so I was drunk. And there was a pretty girl with a camera so I got her to snap me and send me a print. Come on, keep playing bass. Love from me to you. Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States. PS I’m going to marry Princess Anne, I’m going to sing for a big old band, toot my flute til the bird-seeds fly and I’m going to get old and die.